IE team: ''We support Google's and Yahoo's toolbar''

Today several people mentioned on the Web that the new IE7 beta seems to nuke the Google and Yahoo search toolbars, although some people didn't experience these problems. However, the Internet Explorer developers debunk these myths regarding IE7 at their blog:

In our internal testing, we have not encountered these problems in the released version of IE 7 tech beta. (There was a bug like this in earlier builds, so it’s possible that the report came from someone who had access to our pre-beta builds.) In addition to our own testing, we’re working with Yahoo!, Google, and others to make sure their solutions continue to work with IE 7. It’s our intent that all toolbars should continue to work well, whether the toolbar was present before the upgrade from IE 6 to IE 7 or if it was installed after IE 7 was installed. It’s possible that some people are having problems with IE 7 and their toolbars; this was not our intent and we want to know about these issues quickly so we can resolve them before final release. This is why we have a technical beta program before releasing the software broadly.

Tony from the IE developer team also adds that MSN is not the default (and only)search provider in Internet Explorer 7:

The drop down list in the search box has five search providers: AOL, Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. For clean installations who do not have a search provider already set (Windows Vista users primarily), MSN is the default search provider. For upgrades, we respect the user’s address bar auto search setting and set the default accordingly. If it’s one of the providers in our list, we set the default to that provider; if the search provider is not on the list, we add it to our list.

The default search providers can be changed via the Search Settings dialog, he says, and Beta 2 will enable users to add new search providers as well.